Corporate president Vitaly Lopota, head of one of Russia's largest commercial space companies -- Space Corp. Energia -- announced that it had fulfilled a its design objectives it took on when it won an April 2009 contract to design a new multi-purpose rocket.

Comments Mr. Lopota, "We have completed the technical design project taking into account the fact that the new spaceship is to fly to the Moon, among other places."

In addition to a potential Moon shot, the rocket will be tasked with ferrying cargo and passengers to and from the International Space Station (ISS). Federal Space Agency Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin announced earlier in the year that the rocket would be constructed and operational by 2018; the news from Energia shows that target may indeed by reached.

Russia seemingly is in a bit stronger position than the U.S., in that it still maintains domestic capability to launch humans into space (aboard the seasoned Soyuz capsule craft). However, the program is under pressure after a string of failed and/or delayed commercial launches. Most recently a suspected failure in the Briz-M booster scuttled a Proton rocket launch from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. The expensive August 2011 failure destroyed two commercial satellites.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev gave the Russian space agency and its private partners until the end of the summer to work out a plan to fix the deterioriating situation.

While the design side of the equation appears to be rolling forward, the business plan to remedy the recent issues is still very much up in the air. Chief Popovkin had proposed creating a holding company that would tie together top commercial space firms -- such as Khrunichev and TsSKB Progress. The plan then involved creating a sub-holding company inside the greater holding pool to specifically pull in the smaller engine producers, including Energomash, the Khimavtomatiki design bureau, the Voronezh mechanical works, Proton PM, and others.

However, Mr. Lopota blasted that plan, calling it a non-market measure. Some opponents feel that shareholders in the corporate space firms will be short-changed if the government combines them, and further feel that it's a return to Russia's communist past -- a controversial topic in modern Russia.

While I generally agree, the idea around the original ISS and its precursors that'd been on and off the drawing boards since the 60s and 70s, that was promising, and a lot of useful things were VERY possible.

That said, as so often happens in life, government took a great idea and implemented it in the worst possible way imaginable. Freedom Station and similar concepts gave way to smaller plans, which gave way to an international project, which got pared back at the last minute due to typical government cost overruns to where what we have now is almost completely useless. If I'm not mistaken, most of the ISS crews time is spent just keeping the wheels turning, so to speak.

I think the ISS being a white elephant, a money-sink, nearly a disaster, isn't reflective of the merits of a manned presence in space. It's just reflective of how a great agency can be hollowed out and how government bureaucracy can ruin about anything. SpaceX and others are now trying to prove that their is another way forward outside the old paradigm of a couple favored contractors and limitless budgets.

It makes one wonder what the amount of money spent on the ISS would have produced if used by SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace for a similar project. How many billions would it have costs to make a large ring of those inflatable space habitats that could rotate for artificial gravity?

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer